Border Security and Enforcement Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. I thank the chairman for yielding, and I rise in support of his bill.

Mr. Speaker, this is around the 15th time that we have been trying to engage the other body in conversation about how we can reopen the government. They just simply refuse to talk about anything. We have sent over CRs. We have sent over amendments. We have sent over bills. This is the 11th of the many appropriations bills--CRs--at the sequester level that we are going to send to the Senate, and they just simply refuse to talk. I have never seen such a show of negligence and attendance to public duties.

Normally, the time-honored tradition in the Congress--since the founding of this great country--is that, when the House passes a measure and when the Senate passes a measure and they differ, we appoint conferees: the Senate picks out some Members, the House picks out some Members, and we send them off to the back room to work out the differences and to bring the bills back. That is the way it has operated for all of these years. Yet the Senate just simply refuses to talk anything about how to reopen the government.

This bill will help protect our homeland from terrorists, drug traffickers, smugglers, other criminals, and it facilitates legal immigration and ongoing investigations. Right now, our frontline operations are operating at a bare minimum. The men and women who are at work to protect our borders and our ports of entry are working without pay, and employers cannot guarantee the lawful immigration status of their prospective employees.

To reinstate these critical functions, H.J. Res. 79 provides funding for border security efforts at the current annual rate of $18.8 billion. This includes funding for the Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Coast Guard, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management.

These are functions of the Federal Government that are critical to our safety and well-being. They should not have to suffer the effects of this shutdown, but if we pass this bill today and if the Senate passes it and if the President signs it into law, it will stop any further adverse effects from befalling our border security while we work toward reopening the entire Federal Government.

Piece by piece, the Republican House has been working toward reopening the government over the past week. We have done this all with no help--no input--from the Senate. The only thing we have heard from the Senate is a resounding ``no''--``no'' to working with us on a task force or on a committee to reopen the Federal Government and ``no'' to talking with us about our concerns over the multitude of fiscal crises we face. Despite this, the House has passed 15 bills over the past week to fund the government. This is on top of the continuing resolutions we put forward prior to the end of the fiscal year and the regular appropriations bills the House passed. Imagine what we could do if the Senate would come to the table and work with us. We could solve the problem.

There is no question about it that we are never going to be able to get out of this mess if we don't come together, have a real, adult conversation, listen to each other earnestly, and negotiate in good faith. This crisis can't be solved by one party alone or by one body of the Congress alone. This bill is an effort to keep the ball moving toward our goal of ending the entire government shutdown.

The Senate has asked for a clean CR to achieve that end. The funding in this bill is clean and in line with the spending from the last fiscal year. It is essentially what I put forward in my initial, clean CR. So I hope, with that in mind, the House and the Senate will pass this bill in short order.

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